The present invention relates to a document-update notice included in the document management technology.
There have been proposed the following conventional document management systems. The JP-A-10-269071 has stated that the update of a common document element is noticed to a user of a compound document if the document element is shared in the compound document.
Further, the JP-A-10-222534 has stated the system of noticing the update based on the relation among documents with analogous words. The JP-A-10-302014 has stated that the system of managing a user's document inspecting history as log information and providing a user who inspects the documents with a document-update notice if the document is updated.
The JP-A-11-15716 has stated the system of providing a client side with a document-update notice when a document managed on a Web server is updated. The U.S. Pat. No. 5,623,655 has stated the system of providing a user who refers to a common document with a document-update notice through an electronic mail or the like if the common document is updated.
The U.S. Pat. No. 6,088,707 has stated the system of noticing the update of the document managed on the Web server and displaying a list of updated sites and their updated contents.
Moreover, there has known a system of pre-creating a template document with the document relations defined on a document component element unit by using a structured document description language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and managing a document on the foregoing template document.
In developing a new product in the fields of software and medicine, for carrying out a project of developing a new product, a plurality of workers may create many kinds of documents. For example, when developing a new product, a worker A creates a “project document” concerning a policy of an overall project and the other workers B and C create their own “subtask documents” for each subtask based on the “project document”. The “project document” created by the worker A includes the overall schedule and the like. The worker B creates the “subtask document” as referring to the “project document”. When the worker A changes the overall schedule in the “project document”, the worker B changes the “subtask document” based on the updated content of the “project document”. As described above, in a case that a plurality of workers creates the documents in concert, as the sorts of the created documents and the relation among the created documents are made sophisticated, one worker may forget a document-update notice to the other workers. As this result, the other workers perform the work based on the document of the previous version, which leads to the unnecessary work of creating a document. That is, since the document-update notice is not correctly given, the recreation of the document in the work of creating the document is made necessary.
The document-update notice of the prior art does not involve how the proper document-update notice is given to each worker. In a case of managing the foregoing “project document” in the conventional system, the creator of the project document and the user who constantly refers to it may accept the document-update notice. However, the document-update notice does not reach the creators of the subtask documents except the creator of the “project document”. It means that such a creator of the subtask documents has to check the updated status of the document located out of his territory as being conscious of the documents related with his document. It means that lots of time and efforts and working steps are required for checking the state of the document located out of the creator's charge. No aiding function of easily checking the updated state of the related document has been prepared as a system function. Hence, the recreation of the document may disadvantageously take place in the work of creating the document.